Waymo
In plain wordsA company owned by Google's parent, Alphabet, that runs fully driverless robotaxi services in several American cities.
An autonomous-driving company owned by Alphabet and the leading operator of fully driverless robotaxirobotaxi, n.: A taxi with no human driver: you summon it with a phone app, and a self-driving car picks you up and drives you to your destination. services. Its vehicles combine lidarlidar, n.: A sensor that measures distances by firing laser pulses and timing their reflections, building a 3D picture of its surroundings out of millions of points; widely used on robots and self-driving cars., radar and cameras with machine-learned perception, prediction and planning, trained on extensive real and simulated driving. It began public rides with no one in the driver's seat in the Phoenix area in 2020 and as of October 2026 runs commercial service in cities including Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta and Miami, with service announced for further US cities and for London, and testing in Tokyo. Its published safety analyses report substantially fewer injury crashes per mile than human drivers, while incidents and software recalls — including one in 2025 over passing stopped school buses — have drawn regulatory scrutiny. It is the most extensive demonstration to date of autonomous vehiclesautonomous vehicle, n.: A vehicle, usually a car, truck or shuttle, that can drive itself, sensing the road, deciding what to do and steering, braking and accelerating with no human driving. operating commercially without safety drivers.
Origin
Began in January 2009 as Google's self-driving car project, led by Sebastian Thrun and staffed largely by veterans of the DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA Grand Challenge, prop. n.: A series of US government-sponsored races for driverless vehicles held in 2004, 2005 and 2007. No robot finished the first race; within three years, cars were navigating mock city traffic.; it was spun out as Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, in December 2016. Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov have been co-chief executives since 2021.
Related
- autonomous vehicleautonomous vehicle, n.: A vehicle, usually a car, truck or shuttle, that can drive itself, sensing the road, deciding what to do and steering, braking and accelerating with no human driving.
- DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA Grand Challenge, prop. n.: A series of US government-sponsored races for driverless vehicles held in 2004, 2005 and 2007. No robot finished the first race; within three years, cars were navigating mock city traffic.
- TeslaTesla, prop. n.: The American electric-car company led by Elon Musk, whose driver-assistance software, robotaxis and humanoid robot make it a major, and controversial, developer of AI.
- lidarlidar, n.: A sensor that measures distances by firing laser pulses and timing their reflections, building a 3D picture of its surroundings out of millions of points; widely used on robots and self-driving cars.
- sensor fusionsensor fusion, n.: Combining readings from several different sensors, such as cameras, radar, lidar, GPS and motion sensors, to get a more accurate and reliable picture than any one sensor gives alone.
Mentioned in
TeslaTesla, prop. n.: The American electric-car company led by Elon Musk, whose driver-assistance software, robotaxis and humanoid robot make it a major, and controversial, developer of AI.